Jackie Loves Johnser OK?

Neville Thompson

Read by Flora Montgomery and Shane Quigley Murphy

Produced by Canopy Audiobooks

Translated by Ralph Hubbell

Thousand Horsemen Press

Print edition →

Extent: 07:08

Audiobook ISBN: 9781917453356

RRP: £24.99

Publication date: 14 February 2025

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In the final days of World War I and the Ottoman Empire, an unnamed fifteen-year-old boy, suffering from severe bone tuberculosis, drifts from doctor to doctor, unwilling to follow their advice. As his despair and incurable condition trap him in a lonely, fevered solitude, he seeks solace in a platonic infatuation with an older girl, Nüzhet.

Surgical Ward 9 is one of the most raw and honest accounts ever written of a sick person’s inner world —his envy, longing, ambition, disappointment, terror, hope, and despair, all caused by his illness and frailty. This melancholic yet strangely vibrant fictional diary bears traces of Peyami Safa’s own childhood struggles, and its power still endures today.